Who is edmund halley

The comet sped off into space but Mary remained close to her ingenious husband for the remaining 55 years of her life. The couple set up housekeeping at Islington and in time three children completed the family.

Halley equipped a small private observatory and, among other projects, began working on the problem of longitude, a subject that would tantalize him as long as he lived. After his generous father died in , Halley began to feel the need for an increase in income. He was commissioned to survey and chart the tidal currents of the English Channel. In and he took part in two diplomatic missions to Vienna and the Dalmatian coast where ports were being fortified to protect British men-of-war in the Adriatic.

Halley so impressed the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I that he gave the astronomer a diamond ring from his own finger and a letter of high commendation to take back to Queen Anne. Royalty also touched Halley's life when Russia's Tsar Peter the Great visited England and made a point of calling on the eminent scientist. The Tsar asked Halley questions on many subjects and was well satisfied with the answers he received.

He looked upon the genial astronomer as a friend and the story still persists of the high-spirited Tsar trundling Halley through a hedge in a wheelbarrow. In Halley began an Atlantic voyage as the naval officer commanding a man-of-war. This was a rather special ship, built expressly for the special expedition, victualled for 12 months, and carrying a crew of 20 men.

Captain Halley proved himself a competent seaman, noting the longitude and latitude of all ports visited and the variation in the compass in the South Atlantic. He did, however, find some of his crew uneasy and refractory. Returning to England, he dismissed his lieutenant, acquired several more seamen, and again set sail for the South Atlantic. There were icebergs in the lonely southern waters, fog and cold temperatures to be endured.

About miles east of Brazil, Halley reached the tiny uninhabited volcanic island of Trinidad. Several times the scientist and crew were mistaken for pirates. On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a fishing vessel from Maine fired four or five shots through the rigging. His sea-faring experiences must have left their mark. Early in the next year, Halley exchanged his captain's uniform for the gown of a professor of geometry at Oxford. Continuing to be active in the Royal Society, any vestiges of the sea-captain did not prevent him from presenting papers on a great variety of subjects.

In two weeks after a young English nobleman, the Earl of Derwentwater was beheaded for high treason, a brilliant display of northern lights was seen over England.

The two events were popularly linked and the marvelous flares of colour, usually seen only in high northern latitudes, were called Lord Derwentwater's Lights. We may not know Edmund Halley's impression of the unlucky Jacobite lord but we do know that he searched for a scientific explanation for the display of northern lights.

He speculated that the cause might be water vapour or magnetism, but he definitely didn't subscribe to the notion of Lord Derwentwater's supernatural influence. When the eclipse of the sun occurred over southern England in , Halley predicted the track of the shadow where there would be sudden darkness wherein Starrs will be visible.

In the summer of , Venus remained visible in daylight and the learned Professor Halley explained the phenomenon publically to prevent the Superstition of the unskillful Vulgar. If a friend passed along a problem to Halley he could be confident that the scientist would use every means to arrive at a solution. Take, for example, the question posed by John Houghton, also a Fellow of the Royal Society: how can one arrive at a reasonable estimate of the total acreage of England and Wales considering the irregular shape of the land surface?

During the voyage [ 16 ] He proposed using transits of Mercury and even better of Venus to determine the distance of the Sun and therefore the scale of the solar system using Kepler 's third law. Halley returned to England in and published his catalogue of southern hemisphere stars. Despite not having graduated from Oxford he found himself with the reputation of one of the leading astronomers. Honours quickly came his way.

He became a graduate of the University of Oxford on 3 December without taking the degree examinations, the degree being conferred on the command of King Charles II. He was also elected a member of the Royal Society on 30 November becoming, at the age of 22 , one of its youngest ever Fellows.

Hooke claimed that Hevelius's observations, made without telescopic sights, could not be accurate. Hevelius at this time was 68 years old and must have been somewhat dismayed to find that a 23 year old man had been sent to judge him.

However, Halley was [ 1 ] The fame and recognition which Halley achieved so quickly did nothing to endear him to Flamsteed who, despite his praise for Halley in his student days, soon turned against him. Having the Astronomer Royal as an enemy is not the best recommendation for a young astronomer, even one as famous as Halley, who would soon pay the price. Halley did not seek a teaching post at this stage, preferring the freedom to travel and undertake research without commitments.

In he set out on a European tour with a school friend, Robert Nelson. Halley observed a comet while near Calais and travelled to Paris where, together with Cassini , he made further observations in an attempt to determine its orbit.

Much of Halley spent in Italy. Back in England in the following year Halley married Mary Tooke, while his father remarried Halley's mother having died ten years earlier. Not only did marriage bring financial responsibilities to Halley, but his father's marriage seems to have been a total disaster and as a consequence of this support from his father soon dried up.

Further personal problems followed, for in March his father vanished and was found dead five weeks later. Halley had to administer his father's personal estate and he became involved in family, property and legal matters which are described fully in [ 12 ]. Just before his father disappeared, Halley had been involved in an exciting piece of research.

He had shown that Kepler 's third law implied the inverse square law of attraction and presented the results at a meeting of the Royal Society on 24 January Wren , Hooke and Halley then discussed whether it could be shown that the inverse square law implies elliptical orbits for the planets, but failed to come up with a proof.

Halley's work on these problems was disrupted during the following weeks by the difficulties surrounding his father's disappearance and death, but by August Halley was pursuing the problem further by visiting Newton in Cambridge. There he discovered that Newton had already achieved a proof of this and of other highly significant results but did not seem to be going to publish them. Chapman writes in [ 11 ] Glaisher , in an address delivered in Cambridge in , spoke of the role which Halley played in getting Newton 's Principia published He paid all the expenses, he corrected the proofs, he laid aside his own work in order to press forward to the utmost the printing.

All his letters show the most intense devotion to the work. The comet last appeared in , and next will appear in Halley's discovery of stellar motion, though less well known than his comet, was no less an achievement. No longer were the stars believed fixed, either to an outer sphere or in space. British Broadcasting Corporation Home.

Edmond sometimes Edmund Halley was born on 8 November on the eastern edge of London. Influenced by Flamsteed's project to compile a catalogue of northern stars, Halley proposed to do the same for the Southern Hemisphere. To this end in he travelled to the South Atlantic island of St Helena. By the time he returned home in January he had recorded the celestial longitudes and latitudes of stars and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun's disk.

Halley's star catalogue of was the first to contain telescopically determined locations of southern stars and in the same year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.